in ML, or at least in the labs, people don’t really care that much about Nature. my strongest positive association with Nature is AlphaGo, and I honestly didn’t know anyone in ML other than DeepMind published much in Nature (and even there, I had the sense that DeepMind had some kind of backchannel at nature.)
people at openai care firstly about what cool things you’ve done at openai, and then secondly about what cool things you’ve published in general (and of course zerothly, how other people they respect perceive you). but people don’t really care if it’s in neurips or just on arxiv, they only care about whether the paper is cool. people mostly think of publishing things as a hassle, and reviewer quality as low.
Certainly I don’t expect people who already have jobs at top AI companies to start worrying about this. Anyone with an OpenAI job is probably already at, or close to, the top of their chosen status ladder. In the same way, a researcher who gets Nature papers regularly has already made it.
My impression is that too people in the lab-independent AI safety ecosystem are already being tempted by two money-status games: being tempted by the money+status of working at a lab, and being focused on the status of getting top ML conference papers. Adding a third status game of traditional journal publishing would just make these dynamics worse.
there are definitely status ladders within openai, and people definitely care about it. status has this funny tendency where once you’ve “made it” you realize that you have merely attained table stakes for another status game waiting to be played.
this matters because if being at openai counts as having “made it”, then you’d predict that people will stop value drifting once they are already inside and feel secure that they won’t be fired, or could easily find a new job if they did. but, in fact, i observe lots of value drift in people after they join the labs just because they are seeking status within the lab.
in ML, or at least in the labs, people don’t really care that much about Nature. my strongest positive association with Nature is AlphaGo, and I honestly didn’t know anyone in ML other than DeepMind published much in Nature (and even there, I had the sense that DeepMind had some kind of backchannel at nature.)
people at openai care firstly about what cool things you’ve done at openai, and then secondly about what cool things you’ve published in general (and of course zerothly, how other people they respect perceive you). but people don’t really care if it’s in neurips or just on arxiv, they only care about whether the paper is cool. people mostly think of publishing things as a hassle, and reviewer quality as low.
FWIW, with Emergent Misalignment:
We sent an earlier version to ICML (accepted)
Then we published on arXiv and thought we’re done
Then Nature editor reached out to us asking whether we want to submit, and we were like OK why not?
Certainly I don’t expect people who already have jobs at top AI companies to start worrying about this. Anyone with an OpenAI job is probably already at, or close to, the top of their chosen status ladder. In the same way, a researcher who gets Nature papers regularly has already made it.
My impression is that too people in the lab-independent AI safety ecosystem are already being tempted by two money-status games: being tempted by the money+status of working at a lab, and being focused on the status of getting top ML conference papers. Adding a third status game of traditional journal publishing would just make these dynamics worse.
there are definitely status ladders within openai, and people definitely care about it. status has this funny tendency where once you’ve “made it” you realize that you have merely attained table stakes for another status game waiting to be played.
this matters because if being at openai counts as having “made it”, then you’d predict that people will stop value drifting once they are already inside and feel secure that they won’t be fired, or could easily find a new job if they did. but, in fact, i observe lots of value drift in people after they join the labs just because they are seeking status within the lab.